Civilization’s Future

Tradition takes on many guises. During holiday times, North Americas typically prepare excess quantities of food so that all may dine without any concern for hunger. Often turkeys grace the tops of dining room tables. Getting them there takes on a fair quantity of energy.

A reasonable sized turkey weighs in at 30 pounds ( kg). For a farmer to raise one, they will need 75 pounds of feed. While maturing the farmer can put about 400 birds per acre. On Christmas day, people of the United States will eat 22 million birds.

By the energy numbers, all these bird demand:

• 5.61e17 Joules of solar insolation for the land they live on,
• 9.98e15 Joules in their feed,
• 9.89e18 Joules of solar insolation for the land to grow the corn, and
• 6.3e14 Joules to cook for 4 hours at 325F degrees,
• clean water, slaughtering, waste removal, and transportation to consumer constitute an energy cost but are not included here.

The solar insolation constitutes the greatest amount of energy at 1e19 Joules. The feed and cooking heat are much smaller quantities of energy but, in essence, they are refined forms of insolation.

All this boils down to a dietary input of 1.4e15 Joules for humans feasting on meat at the tables. Compare the amount of energy going into putting turkeys on tables with the amount of energy provided to our bodies. Doing so shows just how much we have to be thankful.

A social society learns that cooperating leads to greater benefits than working alone. Ants make large colonies with each inhabitant having the objective of helping their leader survive and prosper. However, in a human society that emphasizes individuality, as with democracy, individuals have the freedom to choose to maximize personal return, to aid society or some mixture of the two.

The prisoner’s dilemma demonstrates a typical consequence resulting from freedom of choice. This math exercise allows two decision makers to choose to be cooperative or selfish. In it, the conclusion depends upon each choice. When cooperating, each receives some. When in conflict, one may receive nearly all and the other little, or both receive nothing. It’s a gamble with the outcome depending upon the choice made.

When a resource becomes finite on Earth, many people will want it. It can be shared and all people benefit. Or, some can share while others want to take it all. In this case, the takers will get it all. But, if everyone wants to take it, then a war could be the result thus denying the resource to both parties.This is much like the prisoner’s dilemma.

Human politics strives to maximize the benefit between human groups thus it aims to share fairly even though some individuals have purely selfish desires. But what about human, non-human interaction? Should we share energy with other creatures like bears, wolves and rabbits and thus both benefit? Or, do we take all the resource, like energy, for ourselves thus leaving the less capable non-humans without energy? And what is the consequence if we make this decision instead of sharing?

Energy flows through the food chain. As each recipient devours energy, they use it for their growth, their body’s maintenance and the growth of young. For example, the moose, a very large herbivore, must eat to grow, keep eating to power its body and eat some more to make more moose. A successful being carves a niche into the food chain so that it can acquire all the energy and material needed for survival and proliferation.

Moose are common throughout the northern hemisphere. They reside about swampy areas so as to eat the fresh, local bush. But a typical adult male moose, weighing 360 kg, will go through 32 kg of forage daily which contain about 46 MegaJoules of energy. Because of this, moose can’t exist in herds and usually live solitary lives. As a result, where ecosystems provide, their density varies from 5 to 39 moose over a range of 10 000 hectares.

Similarly, human’s living at a civilization level of a hunter gatherer likely had a density of 50 people per 10 000 hectares. Our current population density is about 2000 people per 10 000 hectares. And, this assumes we’re spread evenly over all the land surface. This shows that our civilization can’t return to its past without some drastic changes.

Whether dreaming of a big day or celebrating a little good fortune, we know of the promises of lotteries. Take a chance, spend a buck or two and hope not to have to work for the rest or our lives. What bliss!

But, check out the lives of lottery winners. Their disparate reactions after winning show the uniqueness of the individual. Some build churches to provide solace for generations. Others expand largess upon new found friends and quickly end up even poorer than they began. Perhaps in the middle are some that maintain their pre-win lives and use the winnings to provide comforting reassurance. Assuredly many other reactions have prevailed.

The Earth’s petroleum supply represents a lottery win for the human species. This fuel began as trees over 300 million years ago. These plants absorbed energy from our Sun but couldn’t relinquish the energy to detrivores. So, it lay in the ground, waiting. Then, less than two hundred years ago, humans began extracting and refining petroleum. Our species won access to this energy repository!

However, as with lottery winners, this energy bonanza is finite. Once, we burn through the oil reserves, siphon the natural gas and dig up all the coal then the energy surplus is over. Nevertheless, a good amount of energy remains. So, which type of lottery winner might serve our species’ future best and are we heading there?